Down in Miami, in a suite in the Crowne Plaza, Jeb Bush stared at a computer screen. Surrounded by his wife, his children, staffers and several reporters, the 41-year-old Republican candidate for governor of Florida had been running for office for 18 months and had been thinking about it for a lot longer than that. He watched the results roll in, showing the state’s closest such race in more than a century. But he knew.
“I’m going down,” Bush said.
He called his opponent around 11:30 p.m. to concede, then stayed up into the wee hours, smoking his first cigarette in years and drinking Scotch.
Bush lost more than just the election in Florida that night, because his older brother won one in Texas. George W. Bush would get to be a governor, and Jeb Bush would have to wait, upending the family’s expectations and radically scrambling the brothers’ trajectories and presidential prospects.
“Had Jeb won in ’94, he would’ve been the nominee in 2000,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist tells me. Many people I talked to, from politicians to analysts to operatives, say the same thing.
